GNOME

The GNOME 3.32 beta 2 release is here two weeks after the first beta version to add even more improvements and squash as many bugs as possible before the final release hits the streets next month. The second beta release of the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment also marks the beginning of the String Freeze development stage.

Earlier this month, the annual FOSDEM conference happened again at ULB, Bruxelles, Belgium. I had the opportunity to go there, man the GNOME booth, sell socks, and catch up with other GNOME contributors.

Prior to the conference I had booked La Chambre Haute, which is a great little rooftop apartment located in Etterbeek, around 1.7km from the FOSDEM venue. I arranged the apartment for sharing through the GNOME wiki and shared the apartment with fellow GNOMEies Florian, Tobias, Julian and Niclas. We had a really pleasant time there, including oriental cooking and hacking! I can recommend joining for FOSDEM 2020.

Earlier this month I attended FOSDEM in Brussels. This year was much more relaxed than last year because I didn’t have a talk or other major responsibilities. That meant I had a lot more time to talk to fellow GNOME people and other friends working on different projects.

I spent a lot of time at our booth, talking to people coming by, and planning new projects with fellow developers. The only talk I ended up going to was Zeeshan’s on Rust. I really wanted to go see Jordan’s talk as well, but the Rust devroom was way too packed on Sunday. I also attended the Mobile Free Software BoF, where Nicole gave a status update about the Librem 5 to interested community members, and people could ask questions.

The hack computer is built on top of the Endless OS. Endless OS is based on debian and the desktop is a modified gnome shell, but it's not the usual debian derivative, it's based on OSTree. The main difference is that the root filesystem is read only and updates are managed with ostree, that's like a git repository.

This kind of Operating System is easier to maintain, because the user can't modify the base system, so this means that he was unable to break it. All user applications are installed via flatpak, so are independent of the OS version and because of flathub you can install latests version of apps without the need to update the full operating system.

This is the way that Fedora SilverBlue is trying to follow and is a new way to build and distribute GNU/Linux.

Geary 0.13 is out today as a big step-up for this GNOME e-mail client for the Linux desktop.

The Geary 0.13 release features a new UI for creating/managing email accounts, there is finally integration with GNOME Online Accounts, improvements for displaying conversations, better UI/UX work around composing new messages, various bug fixes, security fixes, and other enhancements.

This is a major new release, featuring a number of new features —
including a new user interface for creating and managing email
accounts, integration with GNOME Online Accounts (which also provides
OAuth login support for some services), improvements in displaying
conversations, composing new messages, interacting with other email
apps, reporting problems as they occur, and number of important bug
fixes, server compatibility fixes, and security fixes.

This latest version is now available for installation from Flathub. See
the Geary web site for installation details and other installation
options: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary

Note to maintainers: This version now uses meson for a build system and
has a number of updated dependencies. Please see meson.build for
details.

After listening to the latest episode of Emmanuel’s podcast on the History of GNOME, nostalgia got the better of me, and I decided to dig out the GNOME 1.4 usability study that we ran at Sun Microsystems in March 2001, and make it available online again.

The shitty thing about a gradual rewrite is that a few people end up "owning" all the lines of source code. Hopefully this post is a little acknowledgment of the people that made librsvg possible.

The charts are made with the incredible tool git-of-theseus — thanks to @norwin@mastodon.art for digging it up! Its README also points to a Hercules plotter with awesome graphs. You know, for if you needed something to keep your computer busy during the weekend.

Two members of the Cacophony Project came to linux.conf.au 2019 to give an overview of what the project is doing to increase the amount of bird life in New Zealand. The idea is to use computer vision and machine learning to identify and eventually eliminate predators in order to help bird populations; one measure of success will be the volume and variety of bird song throughout the islands. The endemic avian species in New Zealand evolved without the presence of predatory mammals, so many of them have been decimated by the predation of birds and their eggs. The Cacophony Project is looking at ways to reverse that.

Jack Moffitt started off his 2019 linux.conf.au talk by calling attention to Facebook's "Portal" device. It is, he said, a cool product, but raises an important question: why would anybody in their right mind put a surveillance device made by Facebook in their kitchen? There are a lot of devices out there — including the Portal — using deep-learning techniques; they offer useful functionality, but also bring a lot of problems. We as a community need to figure out a way to solve those problems; he was there to highlight a set of Mozilla projects working toward that goal.
He defined machine learning as the process of making decisions and/or predictions by modeling from input data. Systems using these techniques can perform all kinds of tasks, including language detection and (bad) poetry generation. The classic machine-learning task is spam filtering, based on the idea that certain words tend to appear more often in spam and can be used to detect unwanted email. With more modern neural networks, though, there is no need to do that sort of feature engineering; the net itself can figure out what the interesting features are. It is, he said, "pretty magical".

At the start of his linux.conf.au 2019 talk, Kristoffer Grönlund said that he would be taking attendees back 60 years or more. That is not quite to the dawn of computing history, but it is close—farther back than most of us were alive to remember. He encountered John McCarthy's famous Lisp paper [PDF] via Papers We Love and it led him to dig deeply into the Lisp world; he brought back a report for the LCA crowd.

Grönlund noted that this was his third LCA visit over the years. He was pleased that his 2017 LCA talk "Package managers all the way down" was written up in LWN. He also gave his "Everyone gets a pony!" talk at LCA 2018. He works for SUSE, which he thanked for sending him to the conference, but the company is not responsible for anything in the talk, he said with a grin.

On Friday 18, January 2019, We organised the workshop on Road to Become a GNOME/ Open Source Contributor at Department of Computer Science and Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Manav Rachna International Institute of Research & Studies, Faridabad.

Freedom of choice is a central plank of open source software, and it’s very relevant when choosing and configuring a desktop environment. One of Linux’s best features is its modularity.

Extensibility relates to the ability to customize a desktop environment to an individual’s preferences and tastes. This flexibility is offered by themes, extensions, and applets.

GNOME ships with a System Settings tool which isn’t as diverse as some of its peers. There’s still useful options such as a simple way to enable remote access and file sharing. If you’re serious about customizing GNOME, you’ll need the GNOME Tweaks utility. It’s not an official GNOME app, but it offers some advanced tinkering. But when it comes to micro-configuring the GNOME desktop to your preference, Tweaks still leaves us asking for more. Fortunately, there’s an awesome range of extensions that provide additional functionality.

Here’s our recommended GNOME shell extensions. Most of the extensions are not officially supported by GNOME. But they all take the desktop to the next level, either by adding useful functionality, improving your workflow, or simply offering a touch of panache to the desktop. All the extensions all compatible with the latest release of GNOME. Naturally there’s only open source goodness on offer.

The extensions are best installed from the gnome-shell extensions website. Some extensions are installed by default with Linux distributions.

These metadata tags added by the Nautilus Columns extension are not only useful for a quickly look at some particular audio, pdf or image information from the Nautilus list view, but also to sort some files by a particular metadata tag column to easily identify the files you're looking for.

Nautilus Columns is currently maintained by Spanish blogger Atareao, and it only supports English, Spanish and Galician languages.

Judging from the extension code, it's also supposed to support some video formats as well, but no information was shown for such files on my Ubuntu 18.10 desktop, so it probably needs some fixes in this area. Audio, PDF and Exif metadata was displayed with no issues on my Ubuntu 18.10 desktop.

If you own a Chromecast device and you're using Gnome Shell, you should give Cast to TV a try. This Gnome Shell extension adds a new entry in the system menu which allows casting local files to Chromecast or other devices over the local network.

Beyond the FOSDEM conference itself this past week in Brussels, GNOME developers also used the occasion once again for hosting a developer "hackfest" as they prepare for the home stretch in GTK 4.0 development.

First up, the developers did decide this week to do away with "GTK+" with the project formally just going by "GTK" now... The "plus" is no more. "The "plus" was added to "GTK" once it was moved out of the GIMP sources tree and the project gained utilities like GLib and the GTK type system, in order to distinguish it from the previous, in-tree version. Very few people are aware of this history, and it's kind of confusing from the perspective of both newcomers and even expert users; people join the wrong IRC channel, the URLs on wikis are fairly ugly, etc."

One thing that I really wanted from the beginning was smooth zooming. When the user clicks one of the zoom buttons or presses a keyboard shortcut, the displayed image should smoothly flow in and out instead of jumping to the final zoom level — similar to the way the image smoothly shrinks in to make way for the palette when editing, and expands outwords once done. See this animated mock-up from Jimmac to get an idea.

For the zooming to be smooth, we need to generate a number of intermediate zoom levels to fill out the frames in the animation. We have to dish out something in the ballpark of sixty different levels every second to be perceived as smooth because that’s the rate at which most displays refresh their screens. This would have been easier with the 5 to 20 megapixel images generated by smart-phones and consumer-grade digital SLRs; but just because we want things to be slick, it doesn’t mean we want to limit ourselves to the ordinary! There is high-end equipment out there producing images in excess of a hundred megapixels and we want to robustly handle those too.

Downscaling by large factors is tricky. When we are aiming to generate sixty frames per second, there’s less than 16.67 milliseconds for each intermediate zoom level. All we need is a slightly big zoom factor that stresses the CPU and main memory just enough to exceed our budget and break the animation. It’s a lot more likely to happen than a pathological case that crashes the process or brings the system to a halt.

More in Tux Machines

today's leftovers

For those concerned that running Clear Linux means less available packages/bundles than the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, and Fedora with their immense collection of packaged software, Clear has a goal this year of increasing their upstream components available on the distribution by three times.
Intel Fellow Arjan van de Ven provided an update on their bundling state/changes for the distribution. In this update he shared that the Clear Linux team at Intel established a goal this year to have "three times more upstream components in the distro. That's a steep growth, and we want to do that with some basic direction and without reducing quality/etc. We have some folks figuring out what things are the most desired that we lack, so we can add those with most priority... but this is where again we more than welcome feedback."

You might think this annual poll would be fairly similar from year to year, from what distros we list to how people answer, but the results are wildly different from year to year.
(At the time of the creation of each poll, we pull the top 15 distributions according to DistroWatch over the past 12 months.)
Last year, the total votes tallied in at 15,574! And the winner was PCLinuxOS with Ubuntu a close second. Another interesting point is that in 2018, there were 950 votes for "other" and 122 comments compared to this year with only 367 votes for "other" and 69 comments.

Fedora operating system releases are (largely) time-based activity where a new base operating system (kernel, libraries, compilers) is built and tested against our Editions for functionality. This provides a new source for solutions to be built on. The base operating systems may continue to be maintained on the current 13 month life cycle — or services that extend that period may be provided in the future. A solution is never obligated to build against all currently maintained bases.

If you've lived through a major, natural disaster, you know that during the first few days you'll probably have to rely on a mental map, instead of using a smartphone as an extension of your brain. Where's the closest hospital with disaster care? What about shelters? Gas stations? And how many soft story buildings—with their propensity to collapse—will you have to zig-zag around to get there?
Trying to answer these questions after moving back to earthquake-prone San Francisco is why I started the Resiliency Maps project. The idea is to store information about assets, resources, and hazards in a given geographical area in a map that you can download and print out. The project contributes to and is powered by OpenStreetMap (OSM), and the project's entire toolkit is open source, ensuring that the maps will be available to anyone who wants to use them.

Drupal is the third most-widely used CMS behind WordPress and Joomla. With an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent of the world's billion-plus websites, that means Drupal runs tens of millions of sites. Critical flaws in any CMS are popular with hackers, because the vulnerabilities can be unleashed against large numbers of sites with a single, often-easy-to-write script.

Bradley Kuhn works for the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and part of what that organization does is to think about the problems that software freedom may encounter in the future. SFC worries about what will happen with the four freedoms as things change in the world. One of those changes is already upon us: the Internet of Things (IoT) has become quite popular, but it has many dangers, he said. Copyleft can help; his talk is meant to show how.
It is still an open question in his mind whether the IoT is beneficial or not. But the "deep trouble" that we are in from IoT can be mitigated to some extent by copyleft licenses that are "regularly and fairly enforced". Copyleft is not the solution to all of the problems, all of the time—no idea, no matter how great, can be—but it can help with the dangers of IoT. That is what he hoped to convince attendees with his talk.
A joke that he had seen at least three times at the conference (and certainly before that as well) is that the "S" in IoT stands for security. As everyone knows by now, the IoT is not about security. He pointed to some recent incidents, including IoT baby monitors that were compromised by attackers in order to verbally threaten the parents. This is "scary stuff", he said.

Pat decided to update the Python 3 to version 3.7.2. This update from 3.6 to 3.7 broke binary compatibility and a lot of packages needed to be rebuilt in -current. But you all saw the ChangeLog.txt entry of course.
In my ‘ktown’ repository with Plasma5 packages, the same needed to happen. I have uploaded a set of recompiled packages already, so you can safely upgrade to the latest -current as long as you also upgrade to the latest ‘ktown’. Kudos to Pat for giving me advance warning so I could already start recompiling my own stuff before he uploaded his packages.

The KDE Community has just announced the wider integration of Matrix instant messaging into its communications infrastructure. There are instructions on the KDE Community Wiki as well.
So what’s the state of modern chat with KDE-FreeBSD?
The web client works pretty well in Falkon, the default browser in a KDE Plasma session on FreeBSD. I don’t like leaving browsers open for long periods of time, so I looked at the available desktop clients. Porting Quaternion to FreeBSD was dead simple. No compile warnings, nothing, just an hour of doing some boilerplate-ish things, figuring out which Qt components are needed, and doing a bunch of test builds. So that client is now available from official FreeBSD ports. The GTK-based client Fractal was already ported, so there’s choices available for native-desktop applications over the browser or Electron experience.

If you followed Kdenlive’s activity these last years, you know that we dedicated all our energy into a major code refactoring. During this period, which is not the most exciting since our first goal was to simply restore all the stable version’s features, we were extremely lucky to see new people joining the core team, and investing a lot of time in the project.
We are now considering to release the updated version in April, with KDE Applications 19.04. There are still a few rough edges and missing features (with many new ones added as well), but we think it now reached the point where it is possible to start working with it.

Preliminary Support Allows Linux KVM To Boot Xen HVM Guests

As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests.
The 39 patches touching surprisingly just over three thousand lines of code allow for Linux's KVM to run unmodified Xen HVM images as well as development/testing of Xen guests and Xen para-virtualized drivers. This approach is different from other efforts in the past of tighter Xen+KVM integration.

Servers: Kubernetes, SUSE Enterprise Storage and Microsoft/SAP

One of the questions I get asked quite often by people who are just starting or are simply not used to the “new” way things are done in IT is, “What is the cloud?” This, I think, is something you get many different answers to depending on who you ask. I like to think of it this way: The cloud is a grouping of resources (compute, storage, network) that are available to be used in a manner that makes them both highly available and scalable, either up or down, as needed. If I have an issue with a resource, I need to be able to replace that resource quickly — and this is where containers come in. They are lightweight, can be started quickly, and allow us to focus a container on a single job. Containers are also replaceable. If I have a DB container, for instance, there can’t be anything about it that makes it “special” so that when it is replaced, I do not lose operational capability.

As your data needs continue to expand, it’s important to have a storage solution that’s both scalable and easy to manage. That’s particularly true when you’re managing common gateway resources like iSCSI that provide interfaces to storage pools built in Ceph. In this white paper, you’ll see how to use the SUSE Enterprise Storage openATTIC management console to create RADOS block devices (RBDs), pools and iSCSI interfaces for use with Linux, Windows and VMware systems.